immigrant status IS the characteristic that best correlates with poverty, and education the trait most associated with affluence. female-headed households can now explain about one-third of the black-white poverty difference, age comes in second at 16%, and education at 15%; all-in-all, the three characteristics can explain two-thirds of the poverty gap between blacks and whites.

The last 50 years have given rise to a large, varied class of black-majority cities—both urban and rural, both new and old. Examines the demographic trends that have shaped America’s majority-black cities and highlight the immense value they provide to the nation as a whole.

Despite yesterday’s weak report, the U.S. economy has now experienced more than 100 consecutive months of employment growth. However, new analysis from the Hamilton Project at Brookings highlights a stark divide in employment outcomes since the Great Recession, with struggling rural counties increasingly falling behind America’s thriving urban centers.

Instead of invoking God, O’Rourke and most other Democratic contenders identify religion as a source of division. Eight percent of white Democrats expressed no religious affiliation in 1990. By 2016, the figure was 33 percent.

Women with a degree earn on average 28% more than non-graduate women. Men with degrees earn an average of 8% more than non-graduates. But a third of men go to universities which give them only a “negligible” pay advantage, despite the cost of fees.

Fifteen to 20 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 have fallen out of the American workforce altogether. On the Brookings Cafeteria podcast, Carol Graham examines why this group has fallen into such despair, how they compare to their counterparts globally, and what these trends may hold for the workforce and society.

The current economic expansion began in mid-2009 and has already passed the 1960s’ boom for longevity (106 months, from 1961 to 1969). It is now approaching the record, the 1990s’ boom (120 months, from 1991 to 2001).

Kamala Harris brought sex work into the 2020 spotlight. Here’s what she should do next.

Kamala Harris became the first mainstream U.S. presidential candidate to publicly state she supports the decriminalization of sex work. In 2008, however, Harris opposed Proposition K, a San Francisco ballot measure brought by sex workers to end prostitution arrests in the city.

‘You Have to Pay With Your Body’: The Hidden Nightmare of Sexual Violence on the Border

Americans experience a very different economy depending on where they live. New interactive research from the Hamilton Project at Brookings measures the vitality of states and counties across the country and maps which places are struggling and which are thriving.

It can take years to build great credit—and mere moments to ruin it. Unfortunately, millions of Americans are plagued by poor credit: According to Experian, one of the country’s three main credit bureaus, about 21% of Americans had a deep subprime credit score in 2017. That means they had a cripplingly low credit score of 300 to 499.

Over the past decade, laws in Western Australia have sent thousands of people to prison for unpaid fines. Aboriginal women are particularly vulnerable, and in the worst cases, have been arrested when they called for help.

Changing ‘the tragedy narrative’: More people try a joyful approach to Alzheimer’s

A swath of millions of Americans have been jobless for a year or more: the hard-core unemployed. Among the causes for their stubborn unemployment is a lack of skills, a drug habit, or a felony record. But there is another, largely overlooked reason: Many of these unemployed people simply can’t — or won’t — go where the jobs are.

Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Drinking Water Leave Military Families Reeling

Women make up nearly two-thirds of patients with Alzheimer’s disease in the U.S., in part because they live longer than men. But researchers are also exploring whether menopause-related hormonal changes affect the disease’s development.

In the state of Israel’s early years, a number of parents in immigrant transit camps were told that their babies had died. In recent years, DNA testing has proved that some of those children are still alive. A younger generation is demanding answers.

In a study spanning four different regions of the world, Carol Graham and Sergio Pinto find that prime-age men who have dropped out of the labor force suffer from remarkably low levels of life satisfaction and well-being, with the American cohort in especially deep despair.

Using administrative data for Israeli students, Eric Gould et al. exploit variations in parental involvement due to death, divorce, and increasing specialization of parental roles in larger families to study the causal impact of parental education on a child’s human capital (indicated by a high-stakes matriculation exam). The researchers show that parental education has a large causal impact on the human capital of children; but critically, the size of the impact depends on the amount of time a child spends with each parent.

state appellate court ruled that “fundamental fairness” requires that accused students have a right to a hearing and to cross-examine their accusers. The decision last month came in a USC case but applies to all California public and private colleges.

The New York Times found that the proportion of households earning between $35,000 and $100,000 fell from 53 percent in 1967 to 43 percent in 2013. By this definition, the Times found that since 2000 more people have been exiting the middle class because they’re making too little to qualify, not too much.

Incentivized by the federal government, institutional investors became major players in the rental market. They promised to return profits to their investors and convenience to their tenants. Investors are happy. Tenants are not.

14 Children Died in the Parkland Shooting. Nearly 1,200 Have Died From Guns Since.

Discusses how a history of racially discriminatory policies and practices in the United States has led to the concentration of African-Americans in the South and urban Midwest, limited their upward mobility, and reinforced inequalities between regions.

The debate over how much screen time is appropriate for children is filled with inconclusive results and contradictory findings. Kathy Hirsch-Pasek, Natalie Evans, and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff explain how to make sense of this flurry of research.

Young people around the world are delaying marriage and children, and embracing a new life stage of singleness marked by budding careers, hip urban areas, adult roommates and dating. he delay in achieving traditional markers of adulthood have contributed to falling fertility rates in many wealthy nations, raising concerns about the ultimate economic impact of a shrinking future generation.

Fully half (50 percent) of online daters between the ages of 18 to 34 describe their experience as “entertaining” while those ages 35 to 64 disproportionately describe them as “disappointing” (37 percent).

In the absence of clear pathways to citizenship, undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants who came to the United States as children, commonly known as “Dreamers,” tend to live in more complex and less stable households than their documented or native-born counterparts, according to a new study.

Prior research has shown the widespread impact that lack of legal status has on immigrants’ economic and social well-being, including reduced likelihood of finishing high school, concentration in dangerous jobs, and lower pay for their labor. Combined with the constant threat of deportation, these vulnerabilities undercut the health and well-being of undocumented Latinos. In “Living Arrangements and Household Complexity among Undocumented Latino Immigrants,” Matthew Hall, Kelly Musick, and I provide the first national estimates of the living arrangements of this group and compare their experiences to those of other racial, ethnic, and immigrant groups.

Our study compared the composition, size, and stability of the households of unauthorized immigrants, documented immigrants, and U.S.-born groups, and examined the extent of these groups’ shared family and residential ties. It used nationally representative data from the 1996, 2001, 2004 and 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which include sufficiently large samples of Latino immigrants, information about legal status, and measures of all relationships among household members.

Results show that undocumented migrants are less likely than other groups at similar life stages to live in simple arrangements, exclusively with partners and/or children, and much more likely to co-reside with extended family and non-family members. Their households are also characterized by higher levels of instability, as they change membership, size, and form more frequently than other Latino families.

Undocumented Latinos who were living in the U.S. before age 15 are significantly less likely than documented Latinos and U.S.-born Latinos to be living with just a partner or a partner and children, at 47 percent compared with 55 and 52 percent, respectively.

They are also twice as likely to live with nonrelatives as other groups (including documented Latinos), at 14 percent compared to about 7 percent.

Undocumented migrants are less likely to live with immediate family members, and highly likely to live with extended family members. As many as one-quarter share a household with aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and more distant extended kin, compared with just 12 percent of documented Latinos.

The average undocumented Latino lives in households with more people, on average 3.1 adults and 2 children, compared with 2.7 adults for similarly-aged documented Latinos.

Undocumented migrants’ household size and composition, along with counts of adults, children, and families, exhibit substantially (and significantly) higher rates of change across waves than all other legal/racial groups, including documented Latinos.

Other research finds that undocumented immigrants are more likely to live in overcrowded housing, less likely to be homeowners (Hall and Greenman 2014), and more likely to be making residential decisions within contexts of significant economic and social constraint (Asad and Rosen 2018). Taken together, these findings illustrate the volatility that distinguishes the daily lives of those who lack authorization status in the U.S. The uncertainty associated with the absence of legal authorization destabilizes the family life of undocumented immigrants and others – including U.S.-born citizen children who may be living in their households.

Our study, as well as the other work cited here, sheds much-needed light on some aspects of the lives of those affected by their documentation disadvantage. However, it is critical to note that our analysis cannot speak to the heightened precariousness of Dreamers’ lives due to uncertainty about the future of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Our analyses are also unable to reflect the experiences of the thousands of people who are not included in household data because they are being detained and placed in foster arrangements as part of U.S. family separation and immigrant detention policies. Other research indicates that the looming threat of deportation and detention has consequences for the living arrangements of even U.S.-born citizen children living in households, so there is reason to believe that the current social and political climate may already be compounding the household and family instability and complexity of those who are undocumented (Amuedo-Dorantes and Arenas-Arroyo 2018).

Providing Dreamers with pathways toward permanent residence and the cessation of family separation and institutionalization policies could stabilize and strengthen family life and promote the wellbeing of future generations of immigrant families.

Young adult and senior migration rates have slowed down. Migration magnets for young adults are often havens for educated millennials. Senior migration magnets reflect more traditional retirement destinations.

A federal law is hurting Native American children. It must be struck down.

Once a church is lost, that neighborhood seldom regains a public space offering services like day care, schools and free or below-market space for local groups, arts events, Boy Scout troops and sports teams, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and more. The University of Pennsylvania’s Ram Cnaan has found large social and economic benefits from church operations. His 2016 study of older urban churches found that 89% of total visits to these institutions were to take part in something other than worship. Nearly 90% of beneficiaries weren’t church members. The proportion of adults who attend religious services weekly is now down to 36%, according to the Pew Research Center. Young people in particular are falling away. In 2016 nearly 4 out of 10 American adults under 30 said they have no religious affiliation.

Depression among mothers, which is often fueled by poverty, can affect a child’s development and lead to poor outcomes later in life. Richard Reeves shares policy solutions to break or at least weaken this vicious cycle.